18 Daiva Stasiulis Budlakoti’s contention that he was born after his parents had concluded their employment with the Indian High Commission is supported by (among others) his Ontario certificate of live birth which lists a Nepean doctor’s address rather than the Indian High Commission as the residence of his parents, and affidavits signed by both the former Indian High Commissioner and the Nepean doctor. IRB officials and judges in subsequent court proceedings have treated with suspicion documents and forms of legal evidence that support Budlakoti’s contention that he was born after his parents left the Indian High Commission and therefore is entitled to jus soli Canadian citizenship. Instead they have favoured an alternative set of documents that indicate Budlakoti’s parents were still employed by the High Commission at the time of his birth. Thus, the affidavit evidence of the former Indian High Commissioner is reported to be “undermined” by the fact that the “3rd page of the four-page affidavit is missing” (Budlakoti, Judgment and Reasons, 2014 FC, para 22). The government and the courts relied on several documents from the Indian High Commission and an employment authorization from the Canadian government whose dates place the work departure of Budlakoti’s parents from the Indian High Commission in December 1989, about two months after Deepan’s birth. The integrity of these documents are never questioned by the IRB or Federal Court, even though the former Indian High Commissioner stated that the December date is in error. Central to ANT is the concept of “translation,” whereby all the actors in the network agree that the network is worth building and defending. Translation “requires a performative definition in which power is the consequence of an intense activity of enrolling, convincing and enlisting” (Cowan & Carr, 2008, p. 152). In Budlakoti’s case, this network where state power has been invested is one of extinguishment of his citizenship and production of statelessness. Documents that are enrolled to support this position and treated as factual are those that reinforce Deepan’s exemption from birthright citizenship (regardless of the possibilities that they may express administrative error, laxity or lag). Those that contradict this claim are here enrolled as lacking in integrity, undermined by several other documents, internally inconsistent, or (as in the case of Budlakoti’s passports) dismissed as having been produced in error and of no significance to his efforts to regain state and judicial recognition of his status as a Canadian citizen. If one pierces the thin technical argument regarding the determination of Budlakoti’s birthright citizenship, the rationale behind the Section 3(2)(b) exception to birthright citizenship simply does not apply in this case. The ambivalence expressed by the U.S. State Department to birthright citizenship of U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats, suggesting that it depends on whether they were “born subject to the laws of the [U.S.]” in fact suggests a deeper socio-legal understanding of citizenship. Deepan has never had access to a life of diplomatic privilege where he was not subject to the jurisdiction or the laws of Canada. Quite the contrary – in his troubled youth, he was a ward Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017

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